Ah, Alien Isolation I wanted to love you but you wouldn’t let me.


Being hunted by a predator, through the width of an unknown and hostile space station, where the only way to progress is to come out and enter the very area it stalks makes for one hell of a horror game sell. Especially since I have heard for years how intelligent the Alien in this game was.

I was one of the rare existence who played the game before watching the movie(s) , but I didn’t finish it back then, I didn’t even make it past the first quarter of the game at that time, I didn’t drop it for any particular reason, just got distracted by something else.

But this time I was ready, watched Alien and Aliens to prepare, (Alien is pretty great) and now with enough context and excitement I headed in again.

Games dont really need to look better than this

The game started and I was hooked, the Nostromo-like ship I was in at the start I just loved looking around it. It was the ship I just saw in the movie, the game does a fantastic job of translating the movie’s feel into the game itself. Even after landing on the Sevastopol Station , the game did a great job of expanding on the already fantastic aesthetics of the movie. CRT’s everywhere and all the tech has a solid, cube like look to it, with blinking lights everywhere, 80s vision of the future. They had access to the original art for the movie and made something amazing out of it, the art direction is both unique and having such a strong backbone for the graphics and being technically one of the best looking if not the best looking game of its time means this game has aged phenomenally well visuals wise. The station feels like it's active and has been active, the smoke coming out of the pipes, something in the station is always in motion, no part of the station lacks detail, even in the lockers to hide in, there’s variety in what you find stuck inside the locker wall. The lighting that moves between clinical looking hospital like and the yellow hue of the star. The effects are another part of the game that stands out to me, the thick smoke, the fire, and even the dust particles moving around inside this station is what completes Alien Isolation’s visuals. Moving through the numerous dark corridors and hallways of the stations as the light of my flamethrower turns the environment, a shade of orange I thought “ Do games really need to look better than this ?” . I mean the game does use some tricks, turning off all the post processing can show the game’s age a bit, it uses both film grain and chromatic aberration heavily, but why would you when it’s so tastefully implemented. The game uses a lot of fog everywhere dunno if it's a thing to hide rendering or just a choice on the designer’s part and its Anti Aliasing is kinda awful and these 2 are the only technical complaints I have about it.

The real shortcomings in this department are 2 things, the human characters aren’t that well done, not bad for their time but definitely not on par with the rest, there is a stiffness with the character animation, poor lip syncing and animations.

But that’s not my main problem with the visuals, that would be the lack of variety, after a point the environments of the game started to blend together for me, they didn’t really switch it up with different styles to different floors, I mean it does have variety but that comes too late in the game, when you have already backtracked through the station once.

Sevastapol is never quiet

But the sound design, that’s one thing that never got old, the station is always filled with sounds of machinery and the systems running, every area is filled with hum and buzz. And when there are weird noises around you it's hard to tell if it’s because the Alien’s nearby or because this station is falling apart. Everything has a nice tactile feel to it, the machines work loudly which makes the interactions both satisfying and nerve wracking as you know the alien will hear the sound and come to investigate. The sound effects are layered and immersive and the music reminds me of the movie in bits and builds up tension in other parts but never overtakes ambience. It can get scary enough in the right conditions that I hid even when there was no actual threat present in the area.

The enemies both the Alien and the Androids, always kept me on edge, and a lot of it was due to the sounds they made. The Androids also look creepy as fuck.

The station was already fucked, the Alien was still the worst thing that could happen to it

The overall atmosphere is enhanced by everything surrounding the presentation, Sevstapol and Seegson are no Weyland Yutani, with constant cost management and corner cuttings, they are much less the inhumane evil of Weyland Yutani, but when shit goes fucky there’s a more mundane reason to it all, it's clear humans are working on this ship, greedy humans always looking to one up one another but humans nonetheless. But this has caused the ship which was already in an awful condition before the arrival of the Alien to become hostile even without its presence, the humans have formed groups attacking and warning anyone they see, everyone is on edge. The androids which have some awful programming due to the mentioned cost cutting are quick to attack humans due to just about anything, a problem known much before the alien threat materialized. Things were so bad the whole station was decommissioned days before we arrive.

Too long, Too one note

But I will stop my praise there. By the time I was done with the game I was exhausted, annoyed and bored with the game. This game is too frustratingly linear progression wise and lacking in depth gameplay wise to carry a game for this long. For exactly half of the game I kept thinking “I should be near the end now”, let's get the Alien praise out of the way, the AI of the Alien is great for a large part of the game I was always on edge thinking where the Alien could be, its erratic way of moving around the areas, its patience in sniffing out it’s Prey, and the way it tries to fool the player into thinking its leaving before jumping back down, all of its activities , its heightened senses and its ability to learn makes this a game of nerves and outwitting the opponent.

There’s basically nothing to interact with in the environment that won't progress the story, yes there are vents and and some panels controlling minor parts of the environment. But that’s it you can't turn off lights, you can’t hack anything the environment to work differently, pick up and throw items, move anything in the levels, or even fucking jump. Sneaking around in locations already decided for you, for over two dozen hours got boring in less than half that time, also the Alien being that hard of an opponent while being great at the start slowly got annoying. While hiding in a locker you can't do anything, if I could check the map, listen to voices or anything that would have made parts of the game significantly less dull. As the game went on I got more and more frustrated with this awful shallow stealth system and as my frustration grew I got caught by the Alien more and more and I wasn't scared of the Alien any longer, only annoyed at losing a few minutes of progress and then the game went on for several hours more. And when this game loses its ability to scare it loses its gameplay hook.

The gameplay loop is simple and the only thing separating it from being a chore is the fear of the Alien lurking (and the tactile feel of working the machinery do be kinda satisfying), explore, hide, do minigames and qte’s for 25 Hours while nothing happens to shake up the gameplay vast majority of the time, like new more fun things are there in later parts, combat and more enemies different environments but its too little too late.

The robots are creepy for a bit but they are even less engaging than the Alien, and even when they felt like a breath of fresh air after so many Alien encounters, but even this section went on for too long.

This might be the single worst paced game I have completed, it's almost twice as long as it needs to be and there’s multiple sections of this game that I thought the game would be better off just getting rid of.

And the story itself takes all the way to the last parts of the game to get going fully which is a shame cause I actually like it a lot, I feel like MArlow the game’s antagonist is a really well written character, the whole thing is well written but stretched too thin.

There’s a good well paced game in here somewhere, that game is not this, it's always disappointing to see a game that has so much going for it just completely fail at parts to the point of getting in the way of what is clearly good about it. Its a marvel that Alien Isolation exists, I will never give this game the time of day ever again.